As a new Raspberry Pi 3 owner I found having another monitor, keyboard and mouse to be just a little too much for my limited work-space. It did not take long to find the answer on-line: Virtual Network Computing (VNC). This allows you to access your headless RPi, no monitor etc., from another computer over your home network as if you were sitting in front of the RPi monitor etc.

Other approaches

In the course of researching VNC, I stumbled on two alternatives; X11vnc and Windows Remote Desktop, aka Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) .

X11VNC

X11VNC ( Link ) is a VNC server that works with almost any VNC client such as the Tight VNC viewer. I will not cover how to install it on your RPi as that is well covered in the link and it functions the same as the Tight VNC server described below.

Windows Remote Desktop Connection (RDP)

RDP ( Link ) works very well and has some advantages over VNC. It is easy to install on the RPi. It does not require any modifications to make it load on boot and for now is my ‘go to’ remote application

*** We will do this entirely headless, the only connection to the RPi will be the mico B USB for power.

SSH (do first)

Secure Shell (SSH) allows you to access the RPi command line remotely. We’ll use SSH to remotely set up VNC. Whatever approach you take you will need SSH functioning.

Turn on your RPi and determine its ip address

I like to use a Windows program called Advanced IP Scanner ( Link ) it will display all of the IP addresses on your network. Set up the Advanced IP Scanner to scan your range of IP address, something like 192.168.1.0 – 192.168.1.255 0r perhaps 10.0.0.0 – 10.0.0.255. Now look in the results for the address of the RPi. The Manufacturer will be ‘Raspberry Pi Foundation’. Write down the RPi’s IP address. Note: You may want to increase the DHCP lease time so this address does not change.

Access your RPi via SSH

Install PuTTy ( Link ) on your windows desktop. It is not really an install, just an exacutable file. We will use PuTTy to access the RPi via SSH to set up the VNC.

Start PuTTY and enter the RPi’ ip address in the Host Name field, leave the port on 22, check SSH, click Open

A window will open asking for login as:

The default RPi login is pi and the password is raspberry.

This will give you access to your RPi’s command line:

If you save the PuTTY’s SSH configuration you can easily come back to it, so long as the RPi’s IP address hasn’t changed.

Windows Remote Desktop

This is well covered in the linked page above but will go over the steps here so we have should the link go down. RDP may not be available on all Windows platforms. I have found it in Windows 7 Professional and Windows 10 Home.